Oh, so now they care about State’s rights?!

A Federal Judge has ruled that the Federal Defense of Marriage act is unconstitutional because it infringes upon a State’s right to recognize such ‘marriages.’

A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman.

Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage law violates the Constitutional right of married same-sex couples to equal protection under the law and upends the federal government’s long history of allowing states to set their own marriage laws.

“This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status,” Tauro wrote. “The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state.”

This is crap. The state can recognize whatever it wants and can give whatever benefits it wants to its citizens, however misguided that may be.

What this decision does is impose a federal requirement to recognize and match those benefits. This decision imposes, by judicial fiat, that responsibility to financially support through federal tax dollars the misguided judgment of individual states on the rest of the U.S. population.

Because Massachusetts recognizes gay marriage and grants benefits, I have to as well? This is taxation without representation. I think we have been over this territory before.

Of course, this has nothing to do with State’s rights. Rather it is about imposing through the judiciary what cannot be achieved at the ballot box. Everywhere that gay marriage has been put to a vote by the people, it has failed. Everywhere.

So the people must get out of the way, even if judges must disingenuously assert the rights of states to do it.

This is why those who have continually pushed for state constitutions to be amended to protect marriage have been ahead of the curve. There are those who have criticized states for pushing these amendments suggesting it was gay bashing and overkill since the DOMA already protected states. But we always knew that wouldn’t last.